I first encountered the work of German artist John Bock in August 2010 at the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin. [1] As the name suggests, the gallery was a temporary initiative that ran for two years (September 2008 through August 2010), situated in the centre of the city next to Museum Island. For their last show Bock had been commissioned to curate a mammoth exhibition featuring the work of 65 artists, all combined into an immersive installation across multiple levels. The promotional poster for the exhibition (which I still have a copy of safely rolled up in my closet) is probably a good indication of what the audience encountered when they set foot in the gallery – and to some extent, is perhaps indicative of the kind of imagery that Bock has become synonymous with. Continue reading →

John Latham is generally considered to be a pioneering voice in British conceptual art. Born in what was Livingston, Northern Rhodesia (now Maramba, Zambia), he later studied in London at Regent Street Polytechnic and then Chelsea College of Art and Design. Over the last couple of years, his work has cropped up in several significant international exhibitions both in the UK and abroad, including the Conceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979 at Tate Britain during the middle of last year. In recognition of both his own innovative body of work, and also his vast influence on later generations of artists, the Serpentine galleries are now showing two concurrent exhibitions dedicated to Latham in Hyde Park, London. Continue reading →

Still frame from Incoming, 2015–2016.. Three screen video installation by Richard Mosse in collaboration with Trevor Tweeten and Ben Frost. Co-commissioned by National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and Barbican Art Gallery, London. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and carlier|gebauer, Berlin.

Photographer Richard Mosse is perhaps best known for his expansive multimedia work ‘The Enclave.’ Using now-discontinued military surveillance film, Mosse travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo and captured scenes of the brutal civil conflict in the region. The film rendered the footage in bright pinks and magentas, creating disorienting and dreamlike landscapes, populated by heavily armed guerrillas roaming the hills. In collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost, Mosse then created an immersive installation for the Irish Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2013. He later won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2014 for the same work (which was also shown in an expanded form by The Vinyl Factory at their Brewer Street Car Park in Soho, Central London that same year). Continue reading →

The first time I saw the film Casablanca, I must have been about twenty years old. I was sitting in my grimy student flat watching it on an old computer with my friend, when they turned to me part way through and said something strange. The film was incredible, they acknowledged, but the dialogue was making them cringe. Casablanca of course is now, and probably forever will be, famous for its incredible wealth of iconic lines. From Rick’s sad lament about ‘all the gin joints in town’ to perhaps the zenith of the picture’s dialogue as he and Ilsa say goodbye at the airport, it is responsible for some of the most memorable exchanges and suave one-liners of any film in history. But in reality, my friend wasn’t really commenting on the dialogue in Casablanca as much as the subsequent dialogue around the film. So much of it has become fodder for parody, imitation or even just general praise that even its most ground breaking moments have become over-worn clichés for many, making it hard to encounter the original film without a lot of distracting baggage. It begs the question, how does one say something interesting, original or relevant about work which has long been established as part of the canon? Continue reading →

Copyright Irina Korina taken from ‘Destined to be Happy’ installation shot, GRAD 2016.

Destined to Be Happy is a new site-specific installation by Russian artist Irina Korina that deliberately forgoes a specific narrative or reading in favour of a host of dynamic and evolving associations. Entering the gallery through a side alley, the viewer moves through a dark tunnel which then opens out into a kind of maze, framed by curved corrugated steel panels and burnt out trees. Silver confetti is scattered across the wooden floor of the space while industrial plastic, occasionally bowed under by pockets of water, frames the ceiling. The walls are also draped in plastic, giving the space the strange aura of a construction site, perhaps a half finished retail space. The most visually striking element of the exhibition is the six large figures assembled atop the protruding legs of mannequin dummies, identified in the exhibition text as The Globe, The Tear Drop, The Fire, The Heart, The Rainbow and The Meteorite. A soundscape composed by Sergey Kasich adds an ominously shifting sonic palette to the installation, where elements slowly merge into one another, thereby blurring the line between fragments of identifiable found sound and digital abstractions. Continue reading →

In the 1993 film, Falling Down, Michael Douglas plays an engineer who suffers a psychotic breakdown while stuck in traffic trying to get to his daughter’s birthday party. He abandons his car on the freeway and proceeds to stalk through Los Angeles on foot, trying desperately to “go home,” while steadily encountering the flotsam and jetsam of the early 90’s recession years on the American West Coast. Among other things, the film is a meditation on crisis, the postulation of a society in decline. Continue reading →

William Kentridge is an inescapably South African artist, born in Johannesburg in 1955 during the apartheid era. His parents, both attorneys, represented some of those marginalised by the racist regime of segregation implemented by the National Party in 1948, and finally defeated in 1994 with the election of celebrated African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela as President. This history casts a long shadow over his work, as it does with so many other facets of life in South Africa, and commentators have pointed out that a broad understand of the nation’s complicated (and often traumatic) history is something of a prerequisite for understanding much of his practice. Continue reading →